Without Screaming
by Edgar Night
Summary: Something is slowly picking off the Doctor's companions, one by one. He can feel the fabric of space-time beginning to fray as they are killed before their time... but what connection does it have to the tear in the dimensional barrier? R&R please.
1. Worlds Apart, Pt I

Disclaimer: In one of the alternate universes, I'm pretty sure that Kathryn Shadow and myself are the head writers of Doctor Who. I'm on a mission to find that universe, because in this one, I don't own any of it. Let's all have a sadness!fest with regards to our mutual non-ownership, shall we?

A/N: I'm not sure where the heck in the series this is supposed to be set. I'm thinking somewhere between the end of the Golden Age of Martha and the Donna Era. Or something. Shove it between whichever episodes you wish, really. :-)

A/N2: I'm going to make something vaguely resembling an attempt to shape this particular fic in the image of an actual series of DW, with thirteen episodes and a Christmas special. We'll see how well that turns out. -shrug- If it doesn't turn out, it doesn't turn out, yeah?

Beta'ed by the aforementioned alternate-universe co-head-writer, Kathryn Shadow.

Without Screaming

1

Worlds Apart, Pt. I

August 28th, 2008

Our World

A gentle drizzle pelleted the umbrellas of the impatient businessmen and businesswomen—and a few business-children, from the serious expressions of the uniformed students waiting for their bus. Young men in pressed shirts and slacks mingled at the stop with young women in plaid skirts, knee-high socks and naval blouses. The students took care to keep their iPod volumes as low as their sleepy voices, sharing the stop as they did with their parents' colleagues. No need for a fuss.

The bus arrived perfectly on time, like every morning, and the commuters boarded, spilling the contents of their coin purses into the fare machine or scanning their travelling cards. A lone figure stood, unmoved by the shouldering of the shuffling mass of bodies, his chocolate brown hair slowly absorbing as much water as it could. He stood a good head and a half taller than most of the people around, and looked all the more out of place for it. With his broad grin, long, thin nose, and wide eyes—eyes sparking with eagerness and only slightly mischievous intent—, the fellow was about as well camouflaged as his blue, wooden vehicle, which happened to be parked between a pair of vending machines inside the train station behind him. The man took a deep, hearty breath through his nostrils and savoured the scents of the bustling city.

Mumbled _excuse me_'s filled the Doctor's ears as people milled about him, many giving surreptitious glances of what-an-odd-fellow. Understandably so; he was a very obvious foreigner just standing there, for no apparent reason, at a busy bus stop. Not that he cared about the shouldering and the looks, but eventually he did move—tripped by a wrinkly-skinned, grey-haired woman's dachshund. He promptly fell face-first to the concrete, bumping his arm into the solid pavement. The Doctor rubbed his shoulder, wincing, while the woman apologised at him.

"'s fine!" the Doctor said consolingly as he stood to his feet. "I'm all right, see?" He gestured to himself. "Totally _genki_."

The woman continued to apologise anyway, and then, rather suddenly, decided that her penance had been served. She placed a sweet into his hand and walked away with a bow of farewell. The Doctor sighed with relief and unwrapped the sweet, popping it into his mouth with an _mm_ of contentment. Japanese sweeties—wonderful stuff. Almost as nice as jelly babies.

Humans were unbelievably good at making foodstuffs that would eventually kill you, weren't they?

...Speaking of things that would eventually kill you, where was that whatsit he had been alternately following, chasing, and casually observing for the past week and a half? He had, in fact, been attempting to spot it when he had been standing at the stop, and had only just caught a glimpse of the thing when the dachshund decided to twist its leash around his ankle. He stood on his tip-toes to try and find it again.

Oh, forget that. He waited for the lights to be in his favour and crossed the road. He smiled at everyone he passed, though few smiled back. The Doctor sometimes wished humans were more reliable. It would be infinitely easier to just ask, "Have you seen a large, beetle-ish creature with six thick, armoured legs and a head similar to that of a triceratops?" than go through all this rigmarole of following the silly beast around. But no, humans had to go and be unobservant and all that nonsense.

The really unfortunate thing was that the creature was a master of disguise, chameleonic to the extreme. It was cognizant and had a larynx capable of communicating in humanoid language. Annoyingly, it was also a shape-shifter. The one in particular that he was chasing after had, for all its intelligence, been stupid enough to wander into a malfunctioning teleport on its home planet.

It then landed with a rather loud, unpleasant crunch in the middle of Tokyo. The Doctor had taken it upon himself to nab the thing and return it to its own world. Said task he had charged himself with was proving to be much more difficult than he had previously assumed. Rhino-sized beetle-dinosaur thing with six legs and a shiny black exoskeleton; should stick out like a sore thumb, yeah? Fat chance. It had already absorbed the genetic data from three different denizens of Harajuku, Shibuya, and now Shinjuku. Ergo, it could go from being a girl of about five feet, three inches with ludicrously long hair, dressed in a maid outfit, to being a young man of five feet, seven-point-eight-three inches in a crisp suit, to being a grandfatherly fellow in a wheelchair. "Absorbed the genetic data from", pronounced _eaten_.

The Doctor's self-declared job was to find the thing, perform impromptu surgery on it to get those poor people out of its storage stomach, return said people to their families, and take the creature itself to its home world. Easier said than done didn't come close to describing it.

~ — ~

May 27th, 2007

Pete's World

Rose Tyler yawned and rubbed her sore neck. She had been staring at her computer screen for the past hour, using one of her rare quiet days to—what else?—search for a way to get back to the Doctor. She had done thus almost without rest ever since seeing the wraithlike hologram at Dårlig Ulv Stranden. That was eight months ago. Since then, little Tony had been born, she had been on every continent twice, and had tried and failed so many times to find a suitable puzzle piece to fill the hole in her life left by the Doctor. In the past two months, she had given up on her search for a replacement, and devoted the time used by that, instead, to finding the Doctor himself.

So far, that search had turned out perfectly fruitless. She had looked for and looked into dozens of leads, all of which were either hoaxes or outdated articles on paranormal activity. In just the time she had been on the computer this particular morning, she had found no less than eight web pages devoted to interdimensional rifts, none of which bore anything vaguely resembling a grain of truth. Rose refused to give up, however. She would find him if it was the last thing she did.

On effortlessly debunking the nineteenth theory about time travel and those who engaged in it, Rose sighed and closed the tab she had been using for her search. Rubbing her eyes with one hand and letting out another yawn, she employed the other hand for the purpose of logging onto her email. Spam, adverts, more spam, an update about some sort of family reunion on her father's side, more spam, more adverts. Rose sighed, tucked an errant lock of hair behind her ear, and deleted the useless messages. More spam, another advert—why on earth would she want to try and enter Cambridge, anyway?—, more spam, spam, spam... hello, what was that?

_Unknown Sender: Urgent_

Urgent, eh? Some request from an eccentric civilian, no doubt, asking her for help from imagined baddies. Rose clicked it anyway.

_Miss Tyler,_

_I know who you are._

_That is all._

_That, and I'd like to meet you for coffee. How does Friday sound?_

_-A Friend_


	2. Worlds Apart, Pt II

A/N: Here's a real shocker for you: I still don't own Doctor Who! _LIEKOMGNOWAI_, yes? I know, I know.

A/N2: Sorry about taking so long to update, the sister got married, craziness happened, and I went to an anime convention. Hopefully this will make the wait worth it, even if the last bit *was* written under the influence of a head cold.

Beta'ed by Kathryn Shadow, as usual. :D

Without Screaming

2

Worlds Apart, Pt. II

May 28th, 2007

_I know who you are. That is all_.

Well, that was descriptive. The person had already addressed Rose by name, and he/she obviously (somehow) knew her email. Yes, it was rather easy to assume that this "friend" knew who she was. Which led Rose to believe that the word _who_ had a deeper meaning. And the implications of that were disturbing at best. Rose let out a huff through her nostrils and deleted the email. She wasn't going to coffee with a stranger who neither gave a name nor a specific meeting place.

...What was so "urgent" about coffee, anyway? She rolled her eyes and, after looking at the rest of her emails, shut off the old, weary computer. She bit her lip and leaned back in her chair. The temptation to turn the computer back on and retrieve the message from her trash folder began to rise then. Oh, how it began to rise.

"What would the Doctor do?" Rose mused softly, wetting her lips.

_Why_ did that thought pop up first _every time_ something odd or potentially detrimental to her health happened? _Why_? Admittedly, using WWTDD had saved her life dozens of times, but it had also nearly killed her whenever she attempted to communicate with something that wanted her more than usually dead. She let out an exasperated groan.

Her brain filled with the Doctor's voice, giving perfectly insane advice. Which was more insane, though? The advice or her nagging desire to heed it?

Eventually, Rose looked up at the ceiling, half-growled, half-groaned at it, and turned the computer back on.

~—~

August 28th, 2008

Our World

Two webbed hands shoved into trouser pockets itched with lack of moisture and a desire to touch the open air. A black tongue ran itself over a row of clean, straight teeth. Sea-green eyes shimmered with reflected sunlight, and an inordinately small nose twitched at the odour of every passing pedestrian. There were a lot of those. Pedestrians, not noses. Well, there was also a multitude of noses, but that was neither here nor there.

Large cities were wonderful. Dry, but wonderful. All a foreigner needed to do was don a hat, generic t-shirt, jeans, and a hooded jacket, and _blam_! Every native would pass him by without a second glance, never mind that his skin was a shade of deep blue. The visitor who mused on all these things felt his moisture reserve diminishing, promptly ducked into an alleyway, darted to a vending machine, and paid the peculiarly non-sentient machine for the largest drink it had. Ye gods, the city sucked at one's reserves! The visitor made sure no one was paying attention, unscrewed the yellow cap, and proceeded to down the bottle in one magnificent gulp.

"Mm."

"Pardon!" exclaimed a voice. "'scuse me!"

The visitor spun on his heels to see a thin human run past, eyes wide, mouth agape, limbs flailing as he bolted. A blip sounded in the visitor's ear as his portable interpreting device protested the impossibility that the human had just spoken the programmed native language of its owner, a notoriously difficult tongue known as Aqari. What the—? The P.I.D. continued to blip irritably, and the visitor tapped it rather roughly to tell it not to bother doing... whatever it was doing. A smile spread across his indigo skin and the visitor followed the man at a slightly gentler run.

~—~

As he ran, the Doctor tilted his head up and took a deep breath through his nostrils, hoping to detect the tell-tale scent of rapidly burning oils and scorched meat, which would lead him to the shape-shifter—or a bad yakitori shop. He couldn't smell a thing over the strong, sharp odour of a passerby's lemon drink. Blast.

"Pardon!" the Doctor called out when he neared the main walkway again. When no one moved, he yelled. "'_scuse me!_"

After the initial soft yelps and jumps of oh-goodness-that-fellow-just-screamed-in-my-ear, the people parted for him. He bolted through the gap, having passed the lemon person, and detected the burning smell rather quickly. From what he could discern, the creature had consumed fish, birds, and several dogs for the purpose of taking in enough calories to keep up its transformation. The people in its genetic storage stomach he could rescue, albeit with a bit of a mess.

The dogs... not so much. The Doctor felt a twinge in his right heart. He liked dogs. They were so loyal, a sort of like quadrupedal companions—no. He wouldn't think on that. They were like furry, quadrupedal TARDISes; that was it. But as the smell he was tracking began to fade—was he going the wrong way? Yes, yes he was—memories of his companions, every single one of them, flashed through the Doctor's (incredible) brain anyway, in a thoroughly belligerent manner.

_No_, he thought. _I've got a giant, human-devouring insect on the loose, now's not the time for moodiness and retrospection. Ooh, good word. "Retrospection". I'll have to use that one more often. _

The memories reluctantly let the matter drop, and the Doctor's (incredible) sense of smell picked up the burning scent.

The hunt was on.

~—~

Ye _gods_, the human could run! The semi-aquatic being that followed had to break into a sprint to keep up. The visitor began to wish he hadn't turned down the offer of joining a land-running team in his academy days. The visitor bolted through the crowds as fast as he could, lost the human for a moment, found him again, sprinted some more, and caught up to him in another alley.

The human didn't even notice that an indigo-skinned foreigner had been following him. That was perfectly acceptable. The visitor got as close as he dared to the Aqari-speaking human, which happened to be a little less than a metre.

"Blast," muttered the human, which the foreigner heard as a sharp trill of annoyance. "Lost it again."

_How does he know—_

"Hello," the fellow said, interrupting the foreigner's thought. He turned to the visitor and smiled, showing teeth. "You might want to rethink your choice of soap. I'd say it's having an adverse effect on your skin. And you smell faintly of salmon." The human winked.

The visitor stared, mouth slightly open.

"Any reason why you've been chasing me for the past five blocks?"

"You—you... Ahm..." The visitor coughed and composed himself. "You speak perfect Aqari, sir."

"And your English is positively lovely. Your point?"

"You trill!"

"And you talk with a touch of northern. Your _point_?"

"Wait."

"I haven't got all day, but I'll humour you."

"You said I'm speaking—"

"English, with a hint of a northern accent. I should know, I used to have one."

"_What_?"

"Listen, friend, did you run after me just to compliment my linguistic talent? Because I'm sorry to say that I'm not actually speaking... Aqari, was it?"

"But you've been _trilling_! No human—"

Here the human burst into mad laughter.

"What?"

~—~

October 27th, 2006

"U-1"

Concealed in the shadow of a massive complex and, admittedly, feeling rather small, a figure crouched down and placed a hand against the darkened concrete wall, watching. Its dark brown eyes glimmered maliciously, half-concealed underneath the hood of a peculiarly bright red jacket. Blood trickled between the gaps of its fingers, the breadth of which showed a definite masculinity. It watched, silent, as a brunette in her early-to-mid forties, of perfectly average height and appearance, approached the building. Her gait was marked with determination, and with both hands she held a 9mm. Glock, although the figure noticed that every few seconds she would look at it with distaste in her eyes.

The woman was on a mission, obviously, and if her sneaky nature was any indication, said mission was one she wanted kept secret. The figure's lips pulled back, displaying white teeth in a smile full of unbridled bloodlust. He pulled his hand away from the wall and pulled a small, slender object from his jacket's pocket. One thumb near the end of the object, the man let out a small, low chuckle and pressed the thumb down. A blade devoid of shininess from the bloodstains that covered its length sprung from the button-end, and the bearer licked his lips.

The man stood and, with the switchblade knife safely concealed under an overly long sleeve, approached the gun-toting woman.

"Pardon me, miss," he said in a practiced tone of honeyed smoothness, "but I seem to have misplaced my watch. Could you tell me the time?"

The woman's clenched jaw slackened and she tilted her head. "Excuse me?"

"The time, if you please," the man said, voice now pleading. "I may or may not be late for something, you see..."

With a sigh, the woman lowered her gun and pulled the sleeve of her leather jacket away from her wrist, revealing a tasteful analog watch. "Half past noon."

The man nodded his understanding. "Thank you so much, miss," he said, dipping his head once in a small bow of gratitude.

"You're welcome."

The woman began to walk away, and once she had walked past the man, he called out to her.

"Miss Smith?"

She instantly turned around, eyes wide. "Do I know you?" she asked.

The man grinned. "Not yet, but you will."

He raised his hand and flicked his wrist too quickly for the poor, unknowing woman to even raise her gun in self-defence. The blade of his knife embedded itself into her throat, and she fell to the grass, heart stopped before she even got a chance to scream.

"Take that," was all the man whispered as he approached the corpse, yanked the knife out of her neck, and walked away.


End file.
